Hello World. This article is long overdue: it has been more than seven months since my first hackathon, beautifully organised by Farfetch in Avenida dos Aliados, Porto.

It started when I challenged a friend and we quickly assembled a team: one marketer, one data scientist, one designer, and two developers. We all worked at different companies and had never worked together before. That brings me to the first lesson.

Get out of your comfort zone

If you go to a hackathon, do not simply recreate your everyday team or your everyday work. Challenge yourself, try something new, and learn. Even if you lose the prize money, there are few opportunities that give you this much space to unleash your creativity.

At our only meeting before the event, I suggested building a TV app. The Samsung SDK used technologies we knew, but none of us had worked with smart TVs—or even owned one. During the week we exchanged ideas, watched a lot of YouTube, and I wireframed one screen. We did not write a single line of code before the event.

Go old school. It is fun and rewarding.

Do all the work inside the hackathon timeframe. Planning and defining concepts in advance is fine, but the challenge is to build a working project within 24 or 48 hours. The pressure of the clock reflects the real world: the team must make decisions, change features, and adapt the concept to what is feasible.

We stopped every four hours, went outside for a beer, and discussed our next steps. That naturally divided the work into six parts. While the developers set up the project, marketing and business intelligence gathered market data, and I designed the home screen and initial carousel animation. That animation took several hours to build, but the team saw it as essential to the product experience.

Aim for a polished product

Hackathons have sometimes been treated as code-only geek parties, but they can be much more. You may even have a brilliant idea and win with a keynote presentation. Still, I think the work should reflect the real world, and the goal should be a polished, complete product.

This is where the value of a multidisciplinary team becomes obvious. Engineering matters enormously, but design, usability, and business thinking are also essential. A beautiful interface should complement a strong technical solution. A hackathon is the real world at four times the speed.

Still have time? Build the next idea.

By the end of the third beer, at around the 12-hour mark, the base app was working. We had built a smart-TV concept that brought Farfetch’s ecommerce experience to the television. With time remaining, we returned to an idea from our first meeting: on a large screen, video content should be central.

Finding a specific piece of clothing seen in a catwalk video can be frustrating. If you do not know its details, you may have to search through hundreds of products. Our idea was a curated video channel that mapped products onto the video. When you liked an outfit, you could open its information, add it to a wish list, or buy it immediately.

Create the setting for a strong presentation

We believe this final feature helped us win second place. So why did we spend 12 hours building the wider TV app? Because the feature needed a complete product around it to make sense to an audience. We presented something that could stand on its own, while the extra feature became the factor that made the whole story memorable.

We built a great product, but the lasting value was what we learned. Thank you to everyone at Farfetch and Microsoft—and to my teammates Pedro, Daniel, Manel, and João.